Sens. Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders are lashing out after the Senate voted Tuesday to begin debating a health care plan that would repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act and leave tens of millions of Americans without health insurance.

Leahy, a Democrat, and Sanders, an independent, voted Tuesday afternoon against a motion to proceed to debate on a House-passed health care bill. The vote was held Tuesday before Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., revealed the legislative language that senators will be debating, however.

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Sanders, speaking at a news conference outside the Capitol alongside Democrats after the vote, repeated his assertion that what the GOP is seeking “ is the most dangerous and destructive piece of legislation ever to be discussed on the floor of the Senate in the modern history of our country.”

“ Do not kid yourself, when you throw 22 million Americans off the health care they have — people with cancer, people with diabetes, people with heart disease — thousand of those people will die,” Sanders said. “This is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. Our job is to make sure all Americans have health care, not throw 22 million people off the health care they have.”

Sanders said people across the country must continue to speak out as Democrats and independents in the Senate try to prevent the GOP from passing a repeal of the ACA.

“We’ll do our job here, but we need millions of Americans from coast to coast to stand up and tell the Republicans, ‘This is America, we are not going to pass legislation that allows thousand to die.’”

Vermont’s two U.S. senators lambasted the Republican-controlled chamber’s decision Tuesday to begin debating repeal of the Affordable Care Act, calling it “dangerous” and “disastrous.”

Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) joined their 46 Democratic and independent colleagues, along with two Republicans, in opposing the effort, but Vice President Mike Pence broke a 50-50 tie. That allowed debate to go forward on legislation that could fundamentally alter the country’s health care system.

The vote came as a surprise to many, who assumed President Donald Trump’s effort to do away with Obamacare had failed last week after four key Republican senators announced they wouldn’t support a proposed replacement bill. Tuesday’s vote allows the debate on new health care legislation to proceed, but it’s unclear what version, if any, will actually pass.

In a statement released shortly after the vote, Sanders said, “The vote today to proceed on the health care bill is a step toward passing the most dangerous and destructive piece of legislation in the modern history of our country.” He added, “Make no mistake about it, thousands of Americans every year will die unnecessarily if this legislation is passed.”

he most popular Senator in America blasted Republicans for trying to take away health insurance from tens of millions of Americans.

“We want to see it fail, we want to see millions of people to lose their health insurance so we can win some political points,” is how Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) described Republican efforts to destroy the Affordable Care Act.

“How pathetic is that for a President of the United States to say?” Sanders asked CNN host Anderson Cooper.

“The American people know what’s going on. You, Mr. President and your Republican colleagues will be held accountable,” Sanders predicted.

It looks like they were trying to do a rift on Roosevelt’s New Deal, but ended up with something that sounded more like a pizza slogan.

This follows their much-mocked attempt to have people select a sticker from amongst the most idiotic options imaginable. One of those stickers sort of summed up the Democrat’s approach for going on three decades now: “Democrats 2018. I mean, have you seen the other guys?” Or take this gem: “She persisted. We resisted.” Really?

It looks like the Democrat’s neoliberal establishment power base hasn’t learned a thing, and they’re likely to pay the price in 2018. They’re focusing on tactics, gimmicks, and ploys, at a time when people are fed up with politics as usual

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Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders—the most popular politician in America—simply says what he means, and he operates from a frame of reference defined by values. No equivocating. No vague slogans. No carefully constructed, poll-tested phrasing. And he funded his campaign “thirty-seven dollahs” at a time from small donors. He actively fights for a progressive economic agenda that tackles income inequality, creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all. He openly advocates campaign finance reform. He specifically calls out the power brokers in the oligarchy for their control of our elections and our media.

If Democrats don’t figure out that they need to adopt and back a values-driven agenda, not simply spout slogans, the people will see through it, and Democrats will not achieve the gains needed to get control of the Senate.

On a sweltering evening in a rural corner of Ohio, the struggle for the soul and identity of the Democratic Party is playing out over wine, meatballs and recriminations about Hillary Clinton’s defeat in last year’s presidential election.

Joe Schiavoni, the former top Democrat in the Ohio state senate, is talking to a crowd at a fundraising event for his fledgling bid to become their next governor. He believes leaders of his party in Washington have lost touch with voters. It’s a familiar refrain among Democrats in a state that helped catapult Republican Donald Trump into the White House in November.

“You can’t just talk about things and send out press releases,” says Schiavoni, a former boxer who revels in his blue collar roots. Many in the crowd, a few miles from the Rust Belt city of Youngstown, nod in vigorous agreement. Meeting voters and hearing their daily concerns is vital, he says.

In Ohio, as in other politically competitive “swing” states that Democrats won in 2012 but lost in 2016, Democrats are struggling to come up with a clear message and identity to win back the voters they lost.

On Monday, the national Democratic Party unveiled an economic platform they said would help U.S. families. Called “A Better Deal,” it was the first major step by the party to try to reconnect with voters since the election.

The plan called for creating 10 million jobs over five years and cracking down on monopolies and big corporate mergers.

“But the plan was missing a vital piece,” said Alan Melamed, a longstanding member of the Ohio Democratic Party’s executive committee and a political consultant who has worked on dozens of campaigns for more than 40 years. “We need to show we are fighting for people. The plan failed to do that.”

Since Clinton’s defeat in November, Tom Perez, the head of the Democratic National Committee – the body which runs the national party – has conducted a nationwide “listening tour” to hear why so many traditionally Democratic voters defected to Trump last year.

Yet when he came to Ohio, some Democrats said, he didn’t do much listening – just a lot of talking.

ince the Labour Party’s stunning performance in the UK elections of June 8, comparisons between party leader Jeremy Corbyn and Senator Bernie Sanders have come hot and heavy. It makes sense. After all, here are two old guys calling themselves socialists in the age of neoliberalism. They lead movements full of youthful enthusiasm—against austerity, inequality, and rule by the 1 percent, and in favor of a living wage, free higher education, and robust single-payer health care.

But the conversation tends to ignore the most significant thing that the left insurgencies in the United Kingdom and United States hold in common. A new consensus has emerged among young people that is definitely social democratic—as that term has traditionally been used—or democratic socialist—as Bernie and Jeremy have described themselves. By whatever name, young people are insisting on social solutions to social problems. This consensus rejects the privatizing and individualizing trends that have prevailed since the late 1970s.

Remarkably, this generation—raised, educated, and shaped to neatly fit what Zygmunt Bauman calls “individualized society”—is thinking, aspiring, and acting collectively. They are repudiating spurious but once-galvanizing Reaganite claims to limited government and personal responsibility, turning their backs on Margaret Thatcher’s goal of replacing the “collectivist society” with a “personal society.”

Speaking to a large crowd just before a Sunday school class in Plains, Georgia, former President Jimmy Carter said he believes the United States will ultimately transition away from a for-profit system that leaves millions uninsured to a Medicare-for-All style system that guarantees healthcare to every American as a right.

“I think eventually we’ll have a single-payer system,” Carter said.

The former president went on to add, “When I was in the White House, I tried to get Medicare to cover everyone.” As Max Fine, one of the original architects of Medicare, said in a recent interview with The Intercept, expanding Medicare to cover everyone, not just those over age 65, was the underlying objective of the legislation.

“Single-payer is the only real answer,” Fine concluded.

Carter’s comments come as Medicare for All is experiencing an unprecedented surge in support and enthusiasm at the grassroots. A recent AP/NORC poll found that 62 percent of the American public now believes it is “the federal government’s responsibility to make sure that all Americans have health care coverage.”

Britain is to ban all new petrol and diesel cars and vans from 2040 amid fears that rising levels of nitrogen oxide pose a major risk to public health.

The commitment, which follows a similar pledge in France, is part of the government’s much-anticipated clean air plan, which has been at the heart of a protracted high court legal battle.

The government warned that the move, which will also take in hybrid vehicles, was needed because of the unnecessary and avoidable impact that poor air quality was having on people’s health. Ministers believe it poses the largest environmental risk to public health in the UK, costing up to £2.7bn in lost productivity in one recent year.

The Philippine president has sparked alarm among human rights groups after he threatened to bomb tribal schools, accusing them of teaching students to become communist rebels.

In a televised news conference on Monday, Rodrigo Duterte condemned insurgents for destroying bridges and torching schools in the countryside but said they were sparing indigenous Lumad schools, which he alleged were operating under rebel control without government permits.

“Get out of there, I’m telling the Lumads now. I’ll have those bombed, including your structures,” the president said. “I will use the armed forces, the Philippine air force. I’ll really have those bombed … because you are operating illegally and you are teaching the children to rebel against government.”

Human rights groups called on him to retract the threat, warning such an attack would constitute a war crime.

A band of progressive groups delivered thousands of signatures to Democratic leaders Tuesday urging them to change their recently unveiled economic platform.

Democratic leaders are looking to refocus their attention back on the working class. A Better Deal was unveiled by leadership as a new economic agenda focused primarily on wages, jobs, and training. Some influential progressives are urging party leaders to go further.

The People’s Platform was unveiled as a more progressive alternative to the agenda by party leaders. The alternative platform includes additional items like free Medicare for all and free college tuition. Supporters held a rally outside the U.S. Capitol Building before delivering 100,000 petitions.

“If Democrats want to win in 2018 and beyond, we need to start by supporting legislation that addresses the real issues facing everyday Americans,” the petition stated. “Sign our petition to show your support for a legislative agenda that puts people first.”

The rally ended with supporters delivering the petitions directly to the Democratic National Committee. The national party headquarters is located close to where the rally was held. Nina Turner, a state senator from Ohio, joined the rally in support of the alternative platform.

With the election more than 15 months away, five declared or prospective candidates for governor have already raised more than $1 million each for what promises to be an expensive and hard-fought campaign, reports filed Tuesday show.

The 2018 elections are more than a year away but already, several candidates are talking about challenging Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan. He’s held his seat in his hometown of Janesville for nearly 20 years. Many voters are upset with Ryan’s shepherding of a replacement to the Affordable Care Act through the House, and that he hasn’t held any open town hall meetings in his district since the presidential election. With poll numbers sinking, Ryan’s critics believe the time has never been better to topple the well-financed incumbent.

Today, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Wisconsin State Council endorsed Randy Bryce in his bid to unseat Paul Ryan in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District.

“Randy Bryce is a champion for the hard working people of Wisconsin,” said registered nurse and SEIU Wisconsin State Council President, Dian Palmer. “During our Fight for $15, Randy Bryce stood shoulder to shoulder with us to help raise wages for hardworking people in Southeast Wisconsin. At every round of the fight against Scott Walker and his corporate agenda, Randy was right there with us, organizing tirelessly. It’s time we repeal and replace Paul Ryan with an individual who has demonstrated a unique understanding of the issues we face. Randy Bryce shares our passion for change, and we are enthusiastically supporting his candidacy.”

On Tuesday night, the man running to unseat House Speaker Paul Ryan in the 2018 midterm election held a political fundraiser in New York City. But despite the pricey zip code, this fundraiser was more $10 pints than it was $1,000 plates.

That was the scene at a small dive bar in Manhattan’s East Village where union laborers, young progressives and Hollywood stars filed in to meet Randy Bryce.

“I’ve been just so happy to get the opportunity to get in the Republicans’ face until we all have dirt floors in our house,” the Wisconsinite told the crowd. “Because I’m convinced that’s what they want.”

Tired of lapdog congressional Republicans who refuse to refuse to hold the serially lying, intelligence-leaking, race-baiting, golf-loving, nepotism-flouting Donald Trump accountable for any of his unethical, illegal, and possibly unconstitutional behavior, Democrats are taking matters into their own hands.

And they are doing so in record numbers.

At this point in 2009, Republicans had recruited a whopping 78 challengers who raised at least $5,000. They went on to pick up 63 seats in 2010.

According to the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization, by the end of June this year, 209 Democratic challengers had filed paperwork AND raised at least $5,000.

As President Donald Trump continues to behave bizarrely and erratically—attacking his own attorney general, launching into a political tirade during a speech to Boy Scouts, bringing his 11-year-old son into the burgeoning Russia controversy—a professional association of psychoanalysts is telling its members to drop the so-called Goldwater rule and comment publicly on the president’s state of mind if they find reason to do so.

The Goldwater Rule was formally included in the American Psychiatric Association’s “Principles of Medical Ethics” following the 1964 presidential campaign, during which a magazine editor was sued for running an article in which mental health professionals gave their opinions on Republic presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s psychiatric state. The rule deems public comments by psychiatrists on the mental health of public officials without consent “unethical.”

In a recent email to its 3,500 members, the American Psychoanalytic Association “told its members they should not feel bound by” the Goldwater Rule, which some have characterized as a “gag rule,” STAT’s Sharon Begley reports.

“The statement,” Begley notes, “represents the first significant crack in the profession’s decades-old united front aimed at preventing experts from discussing the psychiatric aspects of politicians’ behavior. It will likely make many of its members feel more comfortable speaking openly about President Trump’s mental health.

For the largest living things standing on the planet, California’s giant sequoias have an unassuming, almost gentle, aura to them. The recognizable cinnamon-colored bark is soft and fibrous. Its cones are modest. When cut down, the trees tend to shatter and won’t produce reliably sturdy timber.

These majestic plants have a lineage stretching back to the Jurassic period but fears over their future have prompted a somewhat counterintuitive plan presented to the Trump administration – in order to save the giant sequoias, some say, their surrounding area must be stripped of protected status.

As part of the Trump administration’s determination to roll back regulation and open public land to private industry, the interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, is currently undertaking a review of more than two dozen national monuments declared since the 1990s. The stated goal of the review is to reboot extractive industries such as mining and logging. Supporters of the Giant Sequoia monument fear a unique ecosystem is at risk from timber industry advocates who would peel back protections.

“If this were a different administration and there was a push by the timber industry and its allies to shrink the monument, I wouldn’t take it too seriously,” said Chad Hanson, a rangy tree ecologist who has agitated for greater sequoia protections for the past two decades. “But the Trump administration? Oh, yeah. We are taking this threat very seriously.”

In July 2008, just over a month after surgery for brain cancer and still in the middle of chemotherapy treatments, Senator Ted Kennedy returned to the Senate floor to help the Democrats break the deadlock and end a Republican filibuster on a bill to destroy Medicare.

Universal health insurance had long been Kennedy’s signature passion and he was perpetually frustrated by the unwillingness of his Senate colleagues to adopt some version of it. Despite partisan differences, however, his colleagues admired Kennedy’s spirit and his commitment to the cause. When he returned to the Senate floor to cast that vote, Senators from both sides of the aisle gave him a standing ovation.

Kennedy died in August 2009, but not before having helped elect Barack Obama as president and urging him to make universal health care a top priority.

Today Senator John McCain returned to the Senate floor a week after receiving a diagnosis that he, too, has terminal brain cancer. And, like Kennedy before him, he received a standing ovation from senators of both parties.

But then McCain cast the deciding vote to allow debate to proceed on repealing the Affordable Care Act. By doing so, he not only voted to undo the major accomplishment of the man who defeated him for president in 2008, but also to deny millions of Americans the quality health care that he’s received for free as a United States Senator.

John McCain often gets cast as a truth-teller to Donald Trump, but his voting record says otherwise. And nowhere was that more clear than on Tuesday when, despite his own ill health, when it came to the decision of whether to take other people’s healthcare away, he cast a decisive vote in the wrong direction.

Addressing his fellow lawmakers, McCain called passionately for a return to regular order, and for senators to work constructively across the aisle. “Why don’t we try the old way of legislating in the Senate, the way our rules and customs encourage us to act,” he said in his Tuesday speech. “If this process ends in failure, which seems likely, then let’s return to regular order!”

Though he has often railed against Trump as if he can’t actually affect what he is complaining about, McCain isn’t a helpless observer – he’s an influential senator. And on Tuesday, as the country draws closer than ever before to the death of the Affordable Care Act, he was a pivotal one.

Had McCain simply voted no to the question of whether the Senate should begin debate on a repeal or replacement of Obamacare, which squeaked by in the Senate with a vote of 51-50, the chamber’s leader Mitch McConnell might well have been forced to do the very thing McCain claimed to want: restore the chamber to order.

McCain, on the other hand, is already facing charges of hypocrisy over his vote to advance legislation that was drafted via a process that he decried.

“It was a powerful speech that surely would have packed more punch had he voted against a bill and a process that violated many of the principles he outlined,” columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote in The Washington Post.

Others, like Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), said the jury was still out on whether Republicans can depend on McCain to pass their bill.

“I think his vote was in some ways less important than his speech … because I think it shows what’s inside him and where he’s going to go ultimately,” he said.

Not only does it look like the notorious “Byrd Rule” will come into play now, mandating that every provision of a 50-plus-one reconciliation vote meet the standards of being budget-specific, but that rule has already stricken at least three provisions from the Senate version of Trumpcare. The item in the bill that defunds Planned Parenthood will require 60 votes now, as ordered by the Senate parliamentarian. GOP leaders have indicated that amendments added by Sens. Ted Cruz and Rob Portman will require 60 votes to pass too.

Additionally, if any points of order about other sections are sustained during the debate, those items will also need 60 votes rather than 50-plus-one. At the end of the day, the GOP could end up with a “skinny repeal,” as they’re calling it, which would merely repeal the individual mandate, the employer mandate and the medical device tax. Or they could end up with an un-passable carcass of a bill.

Congressional Republicans will also soon discover that the destabilization that Trump is inflicting upon D.C. and the world in general is rendering the GOP even less trustworthy than it already was. He is dragging down approval numbers for Congress and spawning a practically unprecedented number of congressional challengers for 2018. There are reportedly 209 Democratic challengers so far, compared with previous norms of around 40 at this point in the cycle.

Trump is dead weight for any Republican who’s serious about governing and, indeed, serious about maintaining his or her seat on the Hill through next November (war or terror attack notwithstanding). Paul Ryan and others have to know this already, but D.C. is notoriously slow on the uptake, and too many naive Republicans still seem to be wishing-on-a-star that Trump will finally calm the hell down and take the job seriously. Since it appears Trump is perennially just hours away from firing either Jeff Sessions or Robert Mueller or both in order to continue obstructing the Trump-Russia investigation, matters are likely to get much more dire for the Republicans before they ever improve.

Franken has gone a little overboard in proving he can be a competent senator. He’s still too cautious cos of his comedic history, plus he’s Jewish. He needs to get right in the face of the FRightwingnuts; and tell them to shove it, clearly and unequivocally. He was re-elected by a solid majority of Minnesotans. So, what exactly is his problem?! T and R to the usual suspects!!

The Democratic National Committee announced Tuesday that it intends to dump $1.5 million in the Virginia governor’s race.

“The DNC is all-in in Virginia. We are training organizers, doubling our boots on the ground, and making significant investments in our digital and data operations that will help lift Democrats to victory up and down the state ballot,” DNC Chair Tom Perez said in a statement.

The investment is one of the largest yet from the DNC and is meant to build up both grassroots efforts and messaging. The DNC will also coordinate with Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam’s campaign to recruit and train volunteers and organize events.

Mr. Northam will face off against Republican nominee Ed Gillespie this fall.

Imran Awan, a House staffer at the center of a criminal investigation potentially impacting dozens of Democratic lawmakers, has been arrested on bank fraud and is prevented from leaving the country while the charges are pending.

A senior House Democratic aide confirmed Awan was still employed by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) as of Tuesday morning. But David Damron, a spokesman for Wasserman Schultz, later said that Awan was fired on Tuesday.

Awan pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to one count of bank fraud during his arraignment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Awan is accused of attempting to defraud the Congressional Federal Credit Union by obtaining a $165,000 home equity loan for a rental property, which is against the credit union’s policies since it is not the owner’s primary residence. Those funds were then included as part of a wire transfer to two individuals in Faisalabad, Pakistan.

MuckRock has uncovered a joint Morton County Sheriff’s Department and North Dakota State and Local Intelligence Center (NDSLIC, a fusion center) threat assessment, dated September 8th 2016, just as the protest near Standing Rock, North Dakota was beginning to crescendo. The 12 page document was part of the trove of records that MuckRock received from the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office in Wyoming.

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Law enforcement focused on protesters driving away oil workers, often claiming they had used force and threats to accomplish this. The threat assessment also makes note that sacred burial grounds were reported to have been disturbed, but at the time waved it off. Later, this would turn out to be true. It also appeared to law enforcement that the arrests were only bringing in more protesters, something that is unsurprising given the optics of unarmed, predominantly Indigenous water protectors facing armed police and private security.

On September 3rd, the assessment claims that that protesters trampled the fence separating pipeline employees and protectors with “dogs, horses, and vehicles,” and asserted that, “the pipeline security officers were hit and jabbed by the protesters with fence posts and flag poles.” The infamous dog attacks on protesters by DAPL private security that resulted are summarized simply as “Dogs were used for defense and protection for the workers.”

For the past year or so, protesters in North Dakota, America, have been trying to prevent an oil pipeline from being built through Native Americans’ sacred land.

As a result, they’ve gone through an astonishing level of electronic surveillance while there, it is claimed.

For instance, fake cellphone towers were used to listen in on personal conversations, draining batteries in the process, leaders of the protest told the BSides security conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday. The protesters also said they saw drones shot down, and had their phone signals jammed and handhelds hacked.

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Fake cellphone towers were also set up to monitor transmissions, the protesters claim. These only connected to a limited number of phones, Dewey said, and imitated the signals sent out by legitimate telcos. Unbelievably, the spy masts were able to take over and control handsets automatically over the air, it is alleged. This suggests software or firmware on the devices were compromised wirelessly – not impossible given the exploitable bugs in today’s handsets.

Health officials in a major American city downplayed dangers of lead contamination in water even as officials in Flint, Michigan, faced a criminal investigation, according to a report obtained by the Guardian.

Residents in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, were given “misleading” statements by health officials who “deflected” attention from lead-contaminated water, according to the audit.

The engineer who helped uncover the lead contamination crisis in Flint warned that the scandal there had undermined trust in drinking water and claimed the Pittsburgh report was a warning that similar mistakes could be repeated, including a failure of oversight by officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

“The road to Flint was paved with this nexus of complacency,” said Virginia Tech engineer Marc Edwards. “Water utilities were cheating, EPA was looking the other way, and health departments were all too happy to let that occur because they wanted to keep their focus on lead paint,” he said.

More than 4 million Americans live in places where contaminants in drinking water exceed a legal limit—and poor, rural areas are often more affected than wealthy, urban and suburban ones. Those are some of the key takeaways from a new database that the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released today.

The database pulls about 30 million records from 2010-2015, mostly from state agencies. With the handy tool, you can enter your zip code and get a report on the contaminants that flow from your tap.

Five US Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders have been barred from Israel under a new law that prohibits entry to the Jewish state by foreign activists who advocate a boycott of the country.

The Israeli interior minister, Aryeh Deri, said in a statement on Tuesday that the five had a long record of advocacy for the BDS movement, which seeks to ostracize Israel by lobbying corporations, artists and academic institutions to sever ties with the Jewish state.

It is the first time the Israeli government has implemented the policy, which won approval in March, allowing authorities to keep out non-citizens who publicly support a boycott of Israel or work for an organization that does.

Supporters of BDS – which stands for boycott, divestment and sanctions – say they are using nonviolent means to promote Palestinian independence efforts. The movement has grown into a global network of thousands of volunteers, from campus activists to church groups and some Jewish groups.

Wab Kinew said the annual pledge would add 20 additional long-term beds at existing facilities to help those with “complex and co-occurring addictions issues.”

Kinew said those spots would rely on a harm-reduction approach, allowing medical treatments that assist detox to continue, such as methadone or suboxone, which aren’t permitted in many existing public programs.

“I think what we’re highlighting here is a gap in the services that has been identified,” said Kinew. “Basically right now, all of the residential treatment options that are publicly funded require abstinence, meaning if you wanted to detox from alcohol but you were on methadone maintenance at the same time because of an opiate addiction, you would have to go off methadone in order to do that.”

Two court orders are the latest impedance to construction of a 350-mile gas pipeline across Pennsylvania.

Environmental Hearing Board Judge Bernard Labuskes Jr. halted almost all work on the Mariner East 2 pipeline while it looks into concerns of several citizens groups, including the Clean Air Council.

We have recently discovered that there have been dozens of spills across the state of a drilling fluid coming from the drilling process for the pipeline,” Clean Air Council attorney Alexander Bomstein told KYW Newsradio. “And in addition, we found out that there have been several instances of water contamination from the drilling into people’s water wells.”

The judge said his ruling could be modified if Sunoco provides the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board “with detailed affidavits explaining why it would cause equipment damage, a safety issue, or more environmental harm than good to stop drilling at the 55 locations where drilling is actively underway.”

Pennsylvania’s Environmental Hearing Board today ordered Sunoco Pipeline LP to temporarily halt some types of work on a $2.5 billion pipeline project designed to carry 275,000 barrels a day of butane, propane, and other liquid fossil fuels from Ohio and West Virginia, across Pennsylvania, to the Atlantic coast.

On July 19, three environmental groups presented Judge Bernard Labuskes, Jr. with documentation showing that the project had caused dozens of drilling fluid spills and other accidents between April and mid-June.

“Across the state, Sunoco has unleashed drilling fluid into exceptional value wetlands, high-quality trout streams, reservoirs, and groundwater endangering both drinking water supplies and our natural environment,” Clean Air Council said in a statement. The nonprofit, along with the Mountain Watershed Association, Inc., and the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, submitted the evidence to the judge one week ago.

The most important thing we can do today as conscious consumers, farmers and food workers is to regenerate public health, the environment and climate stability. We can do this most readily by moving away from industrial, GMO and factory-farm food toward an organic, pasture-based, soil-regenerative, humane, carbon-sequestering and climate-friendly agriculture system.

What’s standing in the way of this life-or-death transformation? Rampant greenwashing. The proliferation of $90 billion worth of fraudulently labeled or advertised “natural” and “socially responsible” food products in the U.S. confuses even the most well-intentioned of consumers and lures them away from purchasing genuine organic or grass-fed products.

Perhaps no company personifies greenwashing more than Vermont-based Ben & Jerry’s. Ben & Jerry’s history—a start-up launched by two affable hippies, from a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont—is legendary. Despite selling out to Unilever in April 2000, the brand’s handlers have preserved its quirky, homespun image and masterfully convinced consumers that Ben & Jerry’s has never strayed from its mission: “to make the world a better place.”

As the New York Times reported, the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) recently sent samples of Ben and Jerry’s top-selling ice cream brands to an independent testing lab for analysis. Ten out of 11 samples tested positive for Roundup (glyphosate and AMPA) herbicide contamination

A lawsuit filed by Enbridge Pipeline against three landowners who challenged a now-completed, 167-mile oil pipeline has been returned to McLean County court by the 4th District Appellate Court for another hearing.

The appellate court ruled that Carla S. Temple, Terry Andreon, both trustees for land trusts, and the JPR Family Partnership are entitled to at least one more hearing related to their claims challenging whether the pipeline is a public necessity.

A 2014 ruling by Judge Paul Lawrence denied the property owners “their only opportunity to challenge” the authority of the Illinois Commerce Commission to condemn portions of their 18 parcels of land for pipeline easements, the appellate court ruled in its July 6 decision.

The lawsuit was among dozens filed by Enbridge against landowners who declined the company’s financial offers for easement rights to construct and maintain the pipeline.

Protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline in North Dakota escalated more than a year ago when Native Americans realized the pipeline’s developers and government officials intended to ignore their request to reroute the pipeline around the Standing Rock reservation.

The decision to proceed on building the Dakota Access pipeline on a path opposed by Native Americans highlighted how federal and state government agencies are accustomed to ignoring or downplaying the concerns of indigenous populations.

Now, a similar scenario is playing out in Virginia and North Carolina, where Native Americans are urging federal, state, and local officials to listen to their concerns about the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a pipeline system that would transport fracked gas from West Virginia into Virginia and North Carolina.

Native Americans “didn’t have opportunities to learn how the route was chosen or to provide input on bodies of water or specific landscapes that their tribes consider sacred and that they might have problems with a pipeline passing through,” Ryan Emanuel, a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina who serves on the environmental justice committee of the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs, told ThinkProgress.

The Protect Children, Farmers & Farmworkers from Nerve Agent Pesticides Act amends the U.S. Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, S. 1624, that oversees food safety and prohibits all chlorpyrifos use in food. It also directs the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to partner with the National Research Council to assess the neurodevelopment effects and other low-dose impacts that exposure to organophosphate pesticides has on agricultural workers and children. In addition to calling for a ban on chlorpyrifos, the bill educates the public about the history of this nerve agent pesticide and the communities that are in harms’ way.

“The chemical industry can and must do better than continue to push for the use of nerve agents in our food. This bill comes at a crucial time when scientific integrity and the protection of the public is compromised by industry collusion with the administration,” said Andrea Delgado, legislative director of the Healthy Communities program at Earthjustice. “The most exposed and vulnerable among us are our children, farmworkers and families in rural communities, and they deserve action now.”

Three days before oral arguments are scheduled in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals on Bureau of Land Management safety measures to regulate fracking operations on public lands, the U.S. Department of Interior is moving ahead with its plan to rescind the 2015 rule.

The rule, which was the product of nearly five years of agency work, expert input, public comments and hearings, never went into effect after it was challenged immediately by oil and gas industry trade associations. After a district court judge set aside the rule in 2016, BLM and citizen groups appealed to the 10th Circuit in late 2016.

The Trump administration, however, reversed course in March 2017 and announced that it would propose repealing the rule. Today, the administration formalized that reversal with a proposal to be published Tuesday for public notice and comment.

“This is another cynical move by the Trump administration that sacrifices our public lands and public safety as a favor to the oil and gas industry,” said Michael Freeman, the attorney for Earthjustice who is representing environmental groups who support the safety rules in the legal action.

Go Ro. Great interview. If only all or most of the Dems wanted to fight for us–the calm truth comes out so easily.

I am honestly puzzled. Have they not experienced that feeling when you wake up and you know that everyday, you are truly being a champion of the people? Do they want their legacy to be stuff or millions of happier, healthier people on a thriving planet?

Officials seized Trump protesters’ cell phones, cracked their passwords, and are now attempting to use the contents to convict them of conspiracy to riot at the presidential inauguration.

Prosecutors have indicted over 200 people on felony riot charges for protests in Washington, D.C. on January 20 that broke windows and damaged vehicles. Some defendants face up to 75 years in prison, despite little evidence against them. But a new court filing reveals that investigators have been able to crack into at least eight defendants’ locked cell phones.

Now prosecutors want to use the internet history, communications, and pictures they extracted from the phones as evidence against the defendants in court.

Evidence against the defendants has been scant from the moment of their arrest. As demonstrators, journalists, and observers marched through the city, D.C. police officers channelled hundreds of people into a narrow, blockaded corner, where they carried out mass arrests of everyone in the area. Some of those people, including a journalist and two allegedly peaceful protesters, are now suing for wrongful arrest.

Police also seized more than 100 cell phones from “defendants and other un-indicted arrestees,” prosecutors disclosed in a March filing.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) responded to reports on Tuesday evening from journalists on Capitol Hill, who alleged that Capitol Police were blocking reporters’ access as they tried to cover healthcare protests.

Reporters from the Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, the New York Post, and the Washington Post all tweeted from the Senate Gallery that reporters were being prevented from covering the protests. As nearly 100 demonstrators were arrested for protesting the vote to move to a debate on Trumpcare, which would cut health care coverage for up to 32 million Americans, police told reporters not to document the scene.

Senate gallery staffer tells reporters to "back up" away from protesters who are being arrested. "This is a crime scene"

Lisa Ling served almost two decades in the Air National Guard, working on communications technology and drones. After an honorable discharge, she discovered her work had led to the deaths of hundreds of people. On our latest episode of Ars Technica Live, she tells Ars editors Annalee Newitz and Cyrus Farivar how that experience turned her into a whistleblower.

..

Though she couldn’t talk to us about the exact technologies she worked on—doing so might get her arrested—Lisa did say that she was dismayed by how inaccurate drones truly are. They are touted as machines for surgical strikes, but she said her experience was that, in practice, distinguishing between an enemy and an innocent bystander was incredibly hard.

Even more disturbing, said Lisa, was the environment of sheer terror that the drones created in small Afghan communities. Lisa pointed out that, in more traditional scenarios, planes fly overhead only to drop ordinance. But armed drones can circle overhead for many hours, leaving the people below in constant fear for their lives. She compared the endless circling to walking through town while carrying large machine guns, pointing them at people randomly. It felt to her like a terrorist tactic.

She also said that she’d signed up for the military to work for her country, not for corporations. A big part of the push for drones is coming from military contractors like Raytheon, which stand to profit from the adoption of their machines. Lisa said it became obvious to her while in the military that corporate interests were guiding military decisions.

Hillary ClintonHillary Rodham ClintonTrump and Sessions no longer speaking to one another: reportTop aides urging Trump to stop public criticism of Sessions: reportPoll: Nearly three-quarters of US Muslims view Trump as unfriendly to themMORE’s upcoming book will double down on Russia’s interference and James Comey’s involvement in her stunning election defeat, according to sources familiar with the memoir.

Privately, Clinton has told friends and longtime associates that she “wants the whole story out there” as she rushes to tweak and put the finishing touches on the book due out in September.

“She really believes that’s why she lost, and she wants to explain why in no uncertain terms,” one longtime ally said. “She wants the whole story out there from her own perspective. I think a lot of people are going to be really surprised by how much she reveals.”

Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server helped bring Trump, not to mention not getting out a strong economic message. Too wrapped up in identity politics. That’s all she spent doing, trying to destroy Trump’s character.

I think if Cruz had been the R nominee, the vote would have swung even more in the R’s favor.

The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama years by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts, according to newly declassified memos that provide some of the richest detail to date on the spy agencies’ ability to obey their own rules.

The memos reviewed by The Hill were publicly released on July 11 through Freedom of Information Act litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union.

They detail specific violations that the NSA or FBI disclosed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or the Justice Department’s national security division during President Obama’s tenure between 2009 and 2016. The intelligence community isn’t due to report on compliance issues for 2017, the first year under the Trump administration, until next spring

The lead author of the controversial Israel Anti-Boycott Act, Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, is open to amending the legislation to address concerns raised by the American Civil Liberties Union, he told The Intercept Monday evening.

The ACLU warned last week that the measure, which targets the BDS movement, was unconstitutional and would have a chilling effect on free speech. In the wake of that warning, and a subsequent article by The Intercept, co-sponsors of the bill have begun to re-examine their support for it.

Cardin said that the ACLU had misinterpreted his legislation, but if it needed to be clarified, he would take the steps to do so. “A lot of the co-sponsors are pretty strongly committed to the freedom of speech,” Cardin said. “We’re certainly sensitive to the issues they raise. If we have to make it clearer, we’ll make it clearer.”

He and the ACLU, he said, disagreed about what the bill would do. “I respect greatly the ACLU. I think that many of their points are just not correct. We don’t want to do anything to infringe freedom of speech,” he said.

I don’t think Clinton has come out for S 720–yet. As the link from 2015 points out, she is against BDS. But Bernie has come out against BDS as well. I’m hoping though he will be a strong voice to push back on the bill since it violates our 1st Amendment rights.

Weird that Bernie is against it. He often speaks of Palestinian rights.

Oh, and sorry I missed your piece on Caitlin, Benny. Just saw a bit on my phone last night. She has a nice sort of bookend piece up yesterday. Looks like I already deleted it. I’m all for every single last person understanding that our government is run by bigger players, especially those that listen to Fright wing news.

Anyhoo, good diary. Always good to have a discussion on a political blog.

Remember that Al Jazeera interview a couple of months ago? Here’s a summary/soundbite of it:

Al Jazeera senior presenter Dena Takruri pushed Sanders on the fact that he added his signature (along with every other senator) to a letter to the United Nations secretary general accusing the institution of bias against Israel and denouncing BDS.

Sanders said he doesn’t accept BDS as a way for Palestinians to pressure Israel to comply with international law.

“No, I’m not a supporter of that,” he told Takruri.

“I mean, look, I respect people who do what they want to do. But I think our job as a nation is to do everything humanly possible to bring Israel and the Palestinians and the entire Middle East — to the degree that we can — together.”

Sanders called for a more even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and called into question supplying “endless amounts of money, of military support to Israel.”

He said a one-state solution to the conflict would spell peril for Israel. “I support Israel’s right to exist.”

President Trump said he will ban transgender people from serving in the military in any capacity, a reversal of the Obama administration decision that would have allowed them to serve, he announced on social media on Wednesday.

Citing the need to focus on victory, Trump said that the military cannot accept the burden of higher medical costs and “disruption” that transgender troops would require.

“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

A retired Navy SEAL Team 6 hero who is transgender had a message for President Donald Trump after he announced the US military would bar transgender people from serving.

“Let’s meet face to face and you tell me I’m not worthy,” Kristin Beck, a 20-year veteran of the Navy SEALs, told Business Insider on Wednesday. “Transgender doesn’t matter. Do your service.”

Beck said Trump’s abrupt change in policy could negatively affect many currently or wanting to serve in the military. The RAND Corporation estimated in 2016 that there were between 1,320 and 6,630 transgender people serving. Many of them just want to serve their country like everyone else, Beck said.

“Being transgender doesn’t affect anyone else,” Beck said. “We are liberty’s light. If you can’t defend that for everyone that’s an American citizen, that’s not right.”

Beck is not just your average service member. Born Christopher Beck, she served for 20 years in the Navy with SEAL Teams 1, 5, and, eventually, the elite 6. She deployed 13 times over two decades, including stints in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. She received the Bronze Star award for valor and the Purple Heart for wounds suffered in combat.

“I was defending individual liberty,” she said. “I defended for Republicans. I defended for Democrats. I defended for everyone.”

The Intercept just published an article about a woman who has fought chemical companies for 40 years and has a trove of documents obtained during the fights. She lives in Oregon and suffered chemicals sprayed by the government to protect trees. Her house burned down and all 4 children died — which sounds like fighting back by the forest industry.

FOR DECADES, SOME of the dirtiest, darkest secrets of the chemical industry have been kept in Carol Van Strum’s barn. Creaky, damp, and prowled by the occasional black bear, the listing, 80-year-old structure in rural Oregon housed more than 100,000 pages of documents obtained through legal discovery in lawsuits against Dow, Monsanto, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the Air Force, and pulp and paper companies, among others.

As of today, those documents and others that have been collected by environmental activists will be publicly available through a project called the Poison Papers. Together, the library contains more than 200,000 pages of information and “lays out a 40-year history of deceit and collusion involving the chemical industry and the regulatory agencies that were supposed to be protecting human health and the environment,” said Peter von Stackelberg, a journalist who along with the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project helped put the collection online.

Bruno Latour continues to point out that the divide between culture and nature, with nature being a stage for action, and nature being a back drop for “truth” from scientific results of the static nature, when in fact humans and non humans have always already been linked and we are even more linked now.

The most important political actor is The New Climate Regime. Here is the information on his book that will be out in a few weeks “Facing Gaia”

The emergence of modern sciences in the seventeenth century profoundly renewed our understanding of nature. For the last three centuries new ideas of nature have been continually developed by theology, politics, economics, and science, especially the sciences of the material world.

The situation is even more unstable today, now that we have entered an ecological mutation of unprecedented scale. Some call it the Anthropocene, but it is best described as a new climatic regime. And a new regime it certainly is, since the many unexpected connections between human activity and the natural world oblige every one of us to reopen the earlier notions of nature and redistribute what had been packed inside.

So the question now arises: what will replace the old ways of looking at nature?

This book explores a potential candidate proposed by James Lovelock when he chose the name ‘Gaia’ for the fragile, complex system through which living phenomena modify the Earth. The fact that he was immediately misunderstood proves simply that his readers have tried to fit this new notion into an older frame, transforming Gaia into a single organism, a kind of giant thermostat, some sort of New Age goddess, or even divine Providence.

In this series of lectures on ‘natural religion,’ Bruno Latour argues that the complex and ambiguous figure of Gaia offers, on the contrary, an ideal way to disentangle the ethical, political, theological, and scientific aspects of the now obsolete notion of nature. He lays the groundwork for a future collaboration among scientists, theologians, activists, and artists as they, and we, begin to adjust to the new climatic regime.

A graduate student and a budding theologian is heading to the end of his dissertation on Latour’s work in religion. The book came out a couple of years ago in French and he provides a summary of the various chapters. And he has a series of three papers in the last three months on the moderns who do not live in space nor time.

Hillary Clinton’s upcoming book will double down on Russia’s interference and James Comey’s involvement in her stunning election defeat, according to sources familiar with the memoir.

Privately, Clinton has told friends and longtime associates that she “wants the whole story out there” as she rushes to tweak and put the finishing touches on the book due out in September.

“She really believes that’s why she lost, and she wants to explain why in no uncertain terms,” one longtime ally said. “She wants the whole story out there from her own perspective. I think a lot of people are going to be really surprised by how much she reveals.